Miranda July stood in her living room in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, apologizing for the sunflowers. It really was a copious amount of sunflowers.

They sprouted from Mason jars and vases, punctuating the austere, Shaker-like furniture in the sunny home that July, who is 37, shares with her husband, the filmmaker Mike Mills, who’s 45. Noticing me noticing the sunflowers, she interjected: “We just had a party. We don’t usually have sunflowers everywhere.”

In person, July was very still, with ringlets of curly hair falling over her wide blue eyes like a protective visor, and she seemed perceptively aware of the “precious” label that is often attached both to her and to her work. At a different point in our time together, I followed her into a hotel room in San Francisco, where Mills had left her a knitted octopus wearing a scarf and hat on the couch. She laughed when she saw it but also appeared a bit mortified: “Oh, God,” she said. “It’s kind of a joke. . . . It’s not. . . . Really, this isn’t us at all.”

At their house, Mills emerged from his office; in contrast to July’s measured composure, Mills seemed in constant motion, often running his hands through his Beethoven hair. Both he and July have directed new films being released this summer. His film, “Beginners,” is loosely based on the true story of his father’s coming out at age 75. July’s film, “The Future,” is her second feature as a director, and it’s a funny, sad portrait of a couple at a crossroads. Sophie, played by July, works at a children’s dance school, and Jason, played by Hamish Linklater, provides tech-support by telephone from their sofa. The couple is weeks away from adopting Paw-Paw, an injured cat and a symbol of impending adulthood who is also the film’s narrator. A talking cat is exactly the kind of detail that might endear people who are endeared by Miranda July and infuriate people who are infuriated by her. There are plenty of both.

“You’ve met us at a weird time,” Mills said. “We’re usually just two workaholics in our separate corners.” July and Mills first crossed paths in 2005, when July’s debut feature, “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” made its premiere at Sundance at the same time as Mills’s film “Thumbsucker.” They met at a party — “She wore a yellow dress,” he recalls — and he watched her do a Q. and A. the next day. “She was so strong and declarative. I fell in love instantly.” They married in the summer of 2009 at Mills’s house in the Nevada hills.

In one sense, July has been enjoying the Platonic ideal of creative success in the age of the hyphenate artist. She publishes short stories in The New Yorker. The seven-year Web project, “Learning to Love You More,” which she produced with Harrell Fletcher — in which more than 8,000 people submitted material in response to online assignments like “Make a protest sign and protest” and “Take a picture of your parents kissing” — was recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Me and You and Everyone We Know” won the Camera d’Or at Cannes and was named by Roger Ebert as one of the best films of the 2000s. She inspires a devotion among her fans that is positively swoony: “I love Miranda July, and everything she does is so subtle and sweet and bizarre and necessary,” is a fairly typical sentiment. July is preoccupied with intimacy — she habitually uses the words “you” and “we” in her titles — and this demands, and inspires, an intense engagement from her followers. After a screening of “The Future” at the San Francisco Film Festival, a small crowd surrounded July, pinning her against the back wall of the movie theater, wanting to tell her, with palpable urgency, how much her work mattered to them. Her office has an entire room filled top to bottom with boxes of letters and objects from fans around the world. One man printed every e-mail he ever wrote and sent them all to July, because only she would understand.

(…)

But is Miranda July the archenemy of seriousness? She has an affinity for surface detail, like the childlike scrawl on her sculptures that appeared in the Venice Biennale or the matching haircuts of her two main characters in “The Future.” But unlike certain directors who fixate on marginalia, creating art in which the engraving on a character’s belt buckle takes precedence over the story, July’s seemingly superficial gestures service something greater: a pulsing emotional center. It’s odd that she has come to represent, for some, a kind of soulless hipster cool, because in July’s work, nobody is cool. There’s no irony to it, no insider wink. Her characters are ordinary people whose lives don’t normally invite investigation. So her project is the opposite of hipster exclusion: her work is desperate to bring people together, forcing them into a kind of fellow feeling. She’s unrelentingly sincere, and maybe that sincerity makes her difficult to bear. It also might make her culturally essential.

(…)

July set out to write a tighter, more controlled story than her first film, with fewer characters. She was also in her 30s, and she was feeling older and less rainbow colored.

“It’s kind of about letting go of that feeling of my 20s, that feeling that I will do absolutely everything, I will have sex with everyone, I will go to every country,” she says. “In your 30s, it’s obvious that a finite amount of things will happen.” In “The Future,” the characters sum it up. Sophie: “We’ll be 40 in five years.” Jason: “Forty is basically 50. And then after 50, the rest is just loose change.”

The midlife crisis is usually a male response to mortality terror, but in “The Future,” it’s July’s character, Sophie, who takes up with a single dad, leaving her bohemian surroundings for an affair in a nice house in the suburbs. For July, the story of a woman fleeing her life was a personal purging.

“I think I was afraid; I was committing to someone forever,” she says. “That [idea] that you might just defect from your life, I’ve been carrying around for so long. You don’t want that to be a constant threat. So I think I was like: O.K., what would happen? So you leave. Then what happens? Then I realized: You’re probably haunted by yourself. Your soul follows you.”

(…)

But when she showed me the construction-paper card, holding it very carefully, she was clearly touched by this man’s love for his wife. With her film, she’s trying to understand and excavate something of that love. There was no fetishizing of the oddball, no crippling nostalgia, no lack of gravitas, either in that desire or in its result.

Maybe not everyone will believe this about her. I asked her what, if anything, she would like to say to those people. “I would just say I’m totally not kidding,” she said. “Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing.”

I joined Google+ and decided that I didn’t want another public platform yet.

I like Twitter. I tolerate Facebook. Google+ seemed (for me) like an awkward mash-up of the two. I found the continual stream of notifications telling me that another 500 people I did not know had put me into circles and that lots of other people I didn’t know had mentioned me really irritating and distracting, and I couldn’t turn them off or easily find the signal in the noise (or find my friends in the flood of people putting me into circles), and when I grumbled about it mildly (agreeing with Warren Ellis that I couldn’t find friends I’d actually want to put in circles among the thousands of people who I was being told were putting me in circles) a couple of hundred people explained to me that I was Doing It Wrong.

It was the “You’re Doing It Wrong” messages that were my personal tipping point. As far as I’m concerned, the mark of a good social network is that it either does what it was made to do easily and cleanly, or it’s bendy enough that you can make it do what you want. And being told “you’re trying to use it like Facebook but really it’s like Twitter!” just made me strangely nostalgic for Twitter. And as Twitter was still there, I cancelled my Google+ account, feeling at this point that I didn’t need another time sink, another place to check, another distraction from work or from life.

(If you cancel your Google+ account, Google+ will then start helpfully emailing you notifications every time someone puts you in a circle or mentions you, even if you had all of the “Email notifications” options previously turned off. This is fixable when you discover the “unsubscribe” option at the bottom of the emails that wasn’t visible when they came in on your phone, but you shouldn’t have to unsubscribe from something you didn’t subscribe to.)

Anyway, I wish Google+ all the best. I’ll probably check it out again in a year or so, if I’m still on the Internet, or sooner than that if they make things so I can’t blog without it. And it may well be an excellent Social Network eventually. It’s still in Beta, after all, and most users aren’t going to get a huge instant flood of followers (circlers?).

So that’s a social network I said goodbye to.

I said hello to Turntable.fm, however, a service (currently US only, alas) that lets you make a room, or join a room, and DJ in it. You and four other people can DJ at a time, sharing music you’ve taken from Turntable’s extensive databases or uploaded. I loved DJing, especially once I decided that there should be more spoken-word stuff out there, and that people might like it, and created http://turntable.fm/neilhimselfs_house_of_poetry and have slipped in there from time to time and just played poetry, and been delighted as other people DJ poetry too.